Men and Women: Strangers to One Another?

Why do men and women so often seem to have such difficulty understanding each other? At times, it is almost as if they speak different languages, as though they were foreigners to one another.

And perhaps, from the point of view of subjective experience, we are always somewhat foreign to each other. Not only men in relation to women and women in relation to men, but every subject confronted with the desire of another person. We can never completely inhabit another person’s experience. The problem begins when we transform difference into essence: “men are like this,” “women are like that.”

Psychoanalysis itself was born within this difficulty.

Freud constructed a significant part of his theory through listening to women in a profoundly patriarchal European society. It was suffering women, many of them diagnosed as “hysterical,” who helped open the door to the discovery of the unconscious. Yet despite listening to them, Freud never entirely ceased to understand femininity through categories deeply marked by his own historical period.

The famous question attributed to him, “What does a woman want?”, has almost become a symbol of this difficulty.

The Oedipus complex itself was initially constructed with the boy as its privileged reference point. When Freud attempts to account for female development, his theory becomes more hesitant and controversial. Concepts such as penis envy and the castration complex reveal not only an attempt to understand female sexuality, but also the historical and cultural limitations of the perspective through which that understanding was constructed.

Today, therefore, we can ask an uncomfortable question:

To what extent did some theories about women actually describe women, and to what extent did they describe the way a male-dominated society imagined women?

Jung attempted to take a different path through the concepts of anima and animus. In his classical formulation, the anima represented the unconscious feminine principle within a man, while the animus represented the unconscious masculine principle within a woman. There is an interesting intuition here: every subject carries psychic dimensions that their conscious identity may struggle to integrate.

But Jung’s formulation also carries the gender stereotypes of his time. The feminine is frequently associated with emotion, relationship and receptivity, while the masculine is associated with reason, spirit, assertion and thought. Read literally today, some of these formulations can appear highly normative and even misogynistic.

Freud and Jung therefore teach us not only through what they discovered, but also through what they were unable to see.

The Woman Who Is Desired and Feared

This difficulty predates psychoanalysis by thousands of years.

In mythology, religion and cultural narratives, we repeatedly encounter the figure of a woman who is simultaneously desired and dangerous. Eve is associated with temptation and transgression. Pandora opens the box that releases suffering into the world. The Sirens seduce men towards their destruction.

These are very different narratives and should not be reduced to a single interpretation. Nevertheless, they allow us to observe a fascinating cultural recurrence: male desire is frequently represented as threatened by a femininity that must be understood, contained or controlled.

Woman becomes simultaneously vulnerable and dangerous.

And it is precisely this contradiction that deserves our attention.

For centuries, many societies demanded that women control their bodies, sexuality, freedom and desire. But those same societies constructed a different prison for men.

Men were told:

• Do not cry.
• Do not be afraid.
• Do not show weakness.
• Be strong.
• Be capable.
• Be sexually potent.
• Win.
• Protect.
• Dominate.

Masculinity therefore becomes an identity that must constantly be demonstrated.

Masculinity as a Narcissistic Wound

A man may consequently experience any sign of vulnerability as a threat to his very identity.

Rejection by a woman may cease to mean simply, “She does not desire me.” Unconsciously, it may become:

“I am not man enough.”

Being unable to provide financially for a family may become:

“I have failed as a man.”

Crying may become:

“I am behaving like a woman.”

And within certain male environments, being called a homophobic slur or having one’s heterosexuality questioned may function as a powerful form of humiliation.

Not because homosexuality represents any diminution of masculinity, of course, but because homophobic cultures have historically constructed precisely that association. The insult attempts to strike at a narcissistic vulnerability:

“You are not man enough.”

This is where the old psychoanalytic language of castration can acquire an interesting cultural interpretation.

Castration need not be understood literally. It can represent an experience of losing potency, status, recognition or control. A man who believes that he must control a woman in order to prove his masculinity may feel profoundly threatened when confronted by an autonomous woman who desires, chooses, refuses and leaves.

The issue then ceases to be merely sexual.

It becomes narcissistic.

Who am I if I cannot be the man I was taught I was supposed to be?

From this can emerge shame, resentment, impotence, anxiety, aggression and an extraordinary degree of suffering that may be extremely difficult to acknowledge.

Because even admitting that one is suffering can itself be experienced as another masculine defeat.

Men Are Also Subjugated by Patriarchy

There is an important paradox here.

Historically, patriarchy granted men far greater political, economic, familial and sexual power than women. It would be wrong to erase that inequality.

Yet the same system that privileges men also imposes upon them a particular way of being male.

The male subject can therefore become simultaneously a beneficiary and a prisoner of an order that existed before him.

He is educated to occupy a particular position and then symbolically punished when he cannot occupy it.

Culture tells him that he must dominate and despises him when he feels dominated.

It tells him that he must protect and humiliates him when he needs protection.

It tells him that he must desire women and becomes suspicious when his desire does not conform to the expected model.

It tells him that he must be independent and then leaves him emotionally unable to ask for help.

This defensive masculinity can generate immense psychological suffering.

Women Can Also Internalise Patriarchy

But it would be equally simplistic to imagine patriarchy merely as a conflict between oppressive men and women who stand entirely outside its logic.

Women, too, were born, raised and socialised within the same cultural structures.

They can also internalise patriarchal expectations concerning masculinity and femininity. A woman may consciously desire an emotionally available man while simultaneously feeling less attracted to him when he displays certain forms of vulnerability. She may defend equality while unconsciously retaining traditional expectations about who should take the initiative, provide protection, earn more money or demonstrate greater confidence.

Likewise, men themselves may reproduce masculine norms that cause them suffering.

This is what makes the problem so complex:

Culture does not exist only outside us. Culture takes up residence within us.

It becomes ego ideal, shame, fantasy, desire, prohibition and expectation.

We begin to police one another.

And eventually, we police ourselves.

Perhaps Difference Is Not the Problem

Men and women are not two psychological species condemned never to understand one another.

There are bodily differences, different social experiences and infinitely varied individual histories. But none of these allows us to reduce millions of human beings to two universal and completely separate psychologies.

Perhaps the most interesting question is not:

“Why don’t men understand women?”

Nor:

“Why don’t women understand men?”

Perhaps it is:

“Why do we find it so difficult to accept that the other person will never correspond completely to what we imagine they ought to be?”

This is precisely where a genuine encounter begins.

To love someone means discovering that the other person does not exist to confirm our identity.

A woman does not exist to confirm a man’s masculinity.

A man does not exist to fulfil a woman’s fantasy of security, strength or completeness.

Neither exists to fill what is missing in the other.

Perhaps men and women really are strangers to one another.

But we are strangers who can learn each other’s language.

And doing so requires us to abandon one of humanity’s oldest fantasies: the belief that understanding another person means making them resemble ourselves.

Perhaps understanding means precisely the opposite.

It means being able to remain in the presence of difference without needing to dominate it.